NASA aims to send the first astronauts to Mars by the end of the current decade. While it would be a huge achievement, we are surely asking ourselves why the space agency hasn’t reached that goal already. It’s 2022 and more than half a century since humans landed on the Moon. Space agencies sent rovers pretty much everywhere in the Solar System. Therefore, why would it be so difficult to send an astronaut to Mars?
Surely the Red Planet is much farther away from Earth than the Moon is. The closest possible distance that separates our planet from Mars is 54.6 million kilometers. That’s more than 142 times the distance between Earth and our natural satellite, the Moon.
But still, technology had evolved tremendously since 1969, meaning the first year when astronomers laid foot on the Moon. The question, therefore, remains: why didn’t NASA send humans to Mars yet?
It may be a political issue
There’s no secret that pretty much everything in society is somehow related to politics. In this area also lies the answer to the ultimate question of why nobody has been to Mars yet, as Peter Diamandis reckons, the CEO of Zero Gravity Operations. The Sun reveals his thoughts on the issue.
The idea is pretty simple: since its foundation more than half a century ago, NASA has been represented by 12 presidential administrations. They often didn’t get to agree with each other when it comes to the space agency’s goals for space exploration.
Diamandis declared for Business Insider:
So what’s happened throughout all of space history after the Apollo program was over was to start, stop, start, stop, cancel. President comes in like Bush comes in to go to the Moon, back to Mars and the next president comes in and cancels that,
The agency is unable to sustain consistent funding to do anything.
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